Vanguard Healthcare Management polishes its national fleet with environmentally responsible Greening the Cleaning® products and powers some transport vehicles with biodiesel fuels made in part from reprocessed cooking oils.

The initiative encompasses "Building Green" concepts, the Environmental Center's Greening the Cleaning® line of environmentally-responsible cleaning products, and a new biodiesel program that reprocesses spent cooking oils from local restaurants into cheap, high-powered fuel for ambulances.

"We want to educate medical centers across the country on the health benefits and overall value of greening and Building Green concepts, and show them new ways to put them into practice," said Deirdre Imus, president and founder of The Deirdre Imus Environmental Health Center™, which has won numerous awards for its efforts.

"Greening The Cleaning® is just the beginning," Ms. Imus said. Building Green encompasses energy efficiency, materials and furnishings, indoor air quality, waste minimization and disposal.

Greening The Cleaning® means eliminating to the greatest extent possible, all cleaning agents containing hazardous ingredients and replacing them with naturally-derived ingredients with the least level of toxicity. One hundred percent of all profits from our institutional products go to the Center for supporting education and research to identify, control and ultimately prevent toxic exposures in the that threaten our children's health.

Since 2001, the award-wining Greening The Cleaning® program has been implemented by healthcare facilities, government authorities, businesses and schools, with direct savings in cleaning costs ranging from budget neutral to 75 percent. The commercial line is distributed by the Central Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired (http://www.cabvi.org/) in Utica, N.Y.

Kevin J. Wallis, Chief Executive Officer of Vanguard, said "We want to become the first truly green EMS service in the U.S., so we want our vehicles to be "green" inside and out. Greening the Cleaning products do the job without harsh chemicals and volatile compounds that could bother people when they are most vulnerable. Both Greening the Cleaning and our biodiesel program are also kind to the environment."

The company is a national provider of medical transport solutions, dedicated to helping medical centers provide top-quality care from the minute emergency care services arrive on the scene. The company responds to more than 200,000 emergencies per year nationally operating dozens of ambulances across the United States. <

In Vanguard's field trials, the biodiesel program has produced fuel at nearly 40 percent less costly than traditional diesel fuel. Vanguard expects to produce about 400,000 gallons of biodiesel this year, and may cut overall costs to operate its hospital based ambulance fleet by as much as 40 percent in the first year. The biodiesel fuel produced by Vanguard has comparable performance to traditional diesel fuel and requires no modification to the engines of current diesel ambulances.

Among Vanguard's national network of clients are: St Francis Hospital in Wilmington, DE, and Hackensack University Medical Center, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, in Hackensack, NJ, home to The Deirdre Imus Environmental Health Center.

Vanguard is piloting the biodiesel program in the City of Wilmington in association with St Francis Hospital which is part of Catholic Health East, a network of more than 30 U.S. hospitals. The Wilmington City government is supportive of establishing a recycling program for spent cooking oil and grease from local restaurants and will encourage businesses to participate. Reducing the flow of oil and grease into city sewers helps reduce sewer backups and overflows, leading to reduced maintenance costs. The School of Engineering at the State University of New York at Stony Brook will provide testing and scientific support as the program progresses.

Biodiesel is a clean-burning fuel, essentially free of sulfur and aromatics. Pure biodiesel contains no petroleum, but can be blended at any level with petroleum diesel to create a biodiesel blend. The blends can be used in most compression-ignition (diesel) engines with little or no modification.